Like many girls in Miss McAnally’s 6th grade class at Kenter Canyon Elementary School, I had the desire to be seen and wanted.  We were starting to develop and some of us needed to wear bras. Sally Crammer, my desk partner, must have been a full B cup. I remember her wearing sleeveless blouses, the semi-circles of sweat stains and fuzzy tufts of dark hairs poking out of her armpits, like little furry animals.

 Many of the girls, like Donna Fine and Ruthie Turney, were wearing bras when we returned from the summer vacation of 1960. I’m not sure they actually needed them, but they were definitely showing more than swollen nipples. Most likely their mothers took them shopping, to Bullocks Westwood or Henshey’s in Santa Monica, and bought them a couple of white “training bras” they could grow into. 

At recess Brodie Greer and some of the other boys chased these girls, weaving through the handball courts and running in circles around the tether-ball poles. The girls squealed and giggled as the boys tried to grab the back of their cotton blouses and take hold of the sandwiched bra band and snap it. Snap! the game was won. I watched this adolescent foreplay from the sidelines, because I was still flat chested, and rather shy. It was like watching a movie about the game of desire on the playground.

 I wanted to be desired too. I wanted to be worthy of attention. My mother got attention because she was famous and beautiful. Famous for being a designer of lingerie. Bras had no mysterious lure for me even when I was little. They were the mainstay of my parents’ business. But for any girl her first bra is special, a rite of passage, like her first period.  The memory stays with her forever. 

I remember my first bra. I still didn’t need one, but I’d graduated from sixth grade and was about to go to summer camp. Sitting at the yellow Formica kitchen table, my mother read me the camp’s clothing and supply list. “Let’s make you a bra,” she suggested. 

How excited I was. The following week I was dropped off at my parent’s factory and I found my way into Mother’s design studio at the far end of the stretched-out building. The long room was filled with design tables, mannequins, and a collection of power machines: a couple of single-needles, a two-needle cover-stich, a zigzag, and a couple of safety overlocks. The sample makers were busy sewing. Mother wore soft blue leather slippers she kept under her worktable. Her hair was twisted up in a chignon. She wore a slim black skirt with a crisp white button-front blouse, and a yellow tape-measure draped around her neck. 

Off in our private corner, the two of us stood at Mother’s work table which was neatly appointed with various metal straight edges, curved rulers, a mechanical pencil, a couple of erasers, a thick stack of fashion magazines, and pads of tracing paper. I wore seersucker shorts and a sleeveless summer top. Mother asked me to stand with my arms in a T as she deftly slipped the tape off her neck and wrapped it gently around my thin chest, then instructed me to remain straight while relaxing my arms down to my side. I loved the soft scent of her Channel No. 5 and the gentle touch of her cool, long fingers, tipped with glossy painted nails. 

She took three measurements: lower chest (the under-bust measurement), across my nipples (the bra’s over-bust measurement), and a couple of inches above my nipples (the upper-chest measurement). Sliding the cloth from under my arms, she measured the distance between my nipples (apex to apex). She slipped the tape over my sloping shoulders for a strap measurement, then had me turn around so she could take a few back measurements. 

With all the numbers recorded on her note pad, she scooted over a high stool next to her swivel chair. A ready student, a jumped up on the seat. Between us Mother placed a piece of blue grid-patterned paper on the corkboard surface. She placed a small jar of silver push pins in front of me and instructed me to place one at the corners of the paper. Transcribing her measurement notes into pencil dots on the grid lines, she instructed me on how to place the ruler between the marks and swipe the lead across the straight edge, dot to dot. 

Then, she handed me the shiny protractor to encircle the shape of the bra cup. At age eleven, I found that one twist of the device was sufficient, its diameter was no wider than a small cookie. Some brassieres had more than eighteen separate pattern pieces, more than a man’s three-piece suit. But because my first bra served no other purpose than creating an illusion, my bra had but a few pieces to sew together.

Mother showed me how to hold the large, heavy scissors, balancing their weight by securing my elbow on the table.

“Try to open the scissors just enough to bite onto the paper, then slide the paper through the blades,” she said. Her steady hands guided me. 

I remember how patient she was while I worked the pieces. I felt the others in the room smiling at my effort, which made me try all the harder.

After we finished cutting out the pattern, Mother passed on the pieces to Rosa, the sample maker, and gave her the simple sewing instructions. We then left her office and she drove me to Van Nuys airport for lunch. When we got back to the design room, Rosa had finished sewing up my bra, made from little pieces of French lace: two small doilies attached to stretchy side bands that hooked together in the back, tiny pink and green satin buds placed at the center front and at the top of the flat discs where the shoulder straps attached. The straps and back band were elasticized, and substantial enough to show under my blouse. That’s all I cared about but I didn’t let my mother know that.

At summer camp I got snapped in the back by a cute, lanky blond boy and it changed me. It was my first bite of romance, my first initiation into my femininity That first bra was more to me than a mere undergarment. It was my first experience with allure.

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The First Lady of Underfashions is a nonfiction saga-like memoir written by Christina Erteszek and includes excerpts from her parents' unpublished memoirs. It is a complex, layered, and nuanced story that bridges the violence of war, the innovation of thought, the singularity of religion, the quest for identity, and the intrigues and intricacies of family life. Jan and Olga escape from World War II Europe and arrive in the US with just a few dollars. They turn their paltry savings into a multi-million-dollar fashion business. Olga becomes a leading patent holder of female lingerie, a trendsetter in the industry, and is widely known for her innovative business tactics. But as this husband-and-wife team think of retiring, they decide to merge with another fashion company, which proves to be a fatal move when a loophole in the agreement allows for a hostile takeover. This is also a story of a daughter's need to find herself. Along her path to self-discovery, she discovers her parents have many secrets, some of which will never be revealed.

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I had no desire to be like my mother; like most of my generation, I was obsessed with “finding myself.” By the time I hit my college years, I fell comfortably into this new hippie generation, determined in its defiance of the norm. It was heady and sensual, and I was deeply into all of it, though I would certainly have qualified as “hippie fashionable.” We went to love-ins and music fests and stopped wearing bras and slips. Our skirts got too short to wear garter belts, and now that pantyhose were in fashion, they were close to obsolete.

Despite my newfound style and free way of being, it never crossed my mind to wear anything but my mother’s underwear, as she’d bring new prototypes and samples home almost daily for me to wear and give her feedback on. New prototypes were like candy in our household, coming in many varieties, each with a purpose, a function. Comfort. And comfort came first. This was true even though the only time I wore a bra now was when I went to work; my choice was the Natural Girl style seamless mini wire bra in polyester tricot with deep décolletage.

My generation recognized our power as we witnessed the oppression and injustice of “’Nam.” I was absorbing Allen Ginsberg’s Howl and the diaries of Anaïs Nin, inhaling Angela Davis, Eldridge Cleaver, and those who dared to challenge traditional authority while dropping acid, tripping at the edge of life, trying to separate myself from the elite status of Brentwood and the Westside. I wanted to enrich my world and intellect but had no interest in joining the establishment in any form. It’s funny to look back to when alternative became a movement—and when discovering new ways and people could put one’s life in danger, even by wearing Olga.

This is not the time to explain the why and how of it, except to tell you what I was wearing the night Charlie walked uninvited into my bedroom. It was in the early summer of 1969. I still can hear the bamboo stalks scratching on the old clapboard beach house where I was living with my friend Mary Lee. I smell the warm salty air drifting through the open window, the muted stars. I was reading Siddhartha; the character had come to a crossroads, a river where he was beckoned. And I was there with him, totally absorbed, when I sensed a presence in my room. My eyes rose to meet a stranger standing at the foot of my bed. Just like that.

We lived right next to the Malibu Feed Bin on Topanga Canyon Boulevard and the PCH where hitchhikers were often deposited on their sojourns back and forth to the beach from the San Fernando Valley. And it was not unusual to have friends stop by unannounced. We seldom locked our front door.

Hitchhikers were common

And we seldom locked our front door,

“What you reading there, honey?” The man spoke in a lazy drawl, like he knew me—but he didn’t.

I blushed as a fire raced through me: a young lady caught in the corner—naked, well, not quite. I was wearing an Olga chemise in pastel pink, trimmed with contrasting ecru lace.

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The First Lady of Underfashions is a nonfiction saga-like memoir written by Christina Erteszek and includes excerpts from her parents' unpublished memoirs. It is a complex, layered, and nuanced story that bridges the violence of war, the innovation of thought, the singularity of religion, the quest for identity, and the intrigues and intricacies of family life. Jan and Olga escape from World War II Europe and arrive in the US with just a few dollars. They turn their paltry savings into a multi-million-dollar fashion business. Olga becomes a leading patent holder of female lingerie, a trendsetter in the industry, and is widely known for her innovative business tactics. But as this husband-and-wife team think of retiring, they decide to merge with another fashion company, which proves to be a fatal move when a loophole in the agreement allows for a hostile takeover. This is also a story of a daughter's need to find herself. Along her path to self-discovery, she discovers her parents have many secrets, some of which will never be revealed.

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Olga Erteszek and daughters

I remember changing clothes after P.E. at Paul Revere Junior High in ninth grade. Jeannie Gardner, one of the most popular girls, had a locker a few spaces down. Usually the locker room screamed with chattering girls jammed between rows of metal cabinets. But on that day, lots of the eighth and ninth graders had already fled to their next class. Jeannie and I were the only girls along the wooden bench that separated us.

I was in my Olga underwear: Young Secret black bra, a four-section contour cup, and a panty garter belt with a tummy-flattening Lycra band. My stocking foot was propped on the bench while I attached the mid-thigh hose top to a garter dangling beneath my tricot panty. I sensed Jeannie staring, mesmerized, as I snapped the black rubber tab into a metal ring. I was enjoying the attention, as Jeannie usually ignored me—not that I cared much, though she was prettier and more popular.

At fourteen, petite and shapely Jeannie resembled Sandra Dee. She went out with an older guy, an eleventh-grade football star who drove a red convertible Mustang. I spied the Plain Jane white undies gathering up at her waist with a droop at the butt, like they’d been washed and worn too many times. After working alongside my mother to construct my very first bra and visiting the Olga Company so many times, I couldn’t help but notice that the bra covering her perfect breasts puckered at the sides, while the stretched-out elastic stood away from her underarm. I suspected her mom bought her Lollypop underwear, three to a pack at Sears and Roebuck on Pico Boulevard. Her cheap underwear distracted me from who I thought she really was and it made me feel spiteful, not Christian-like at all. I assessed and judged like my parents were forced to do on that painful path to freedom. Though in the ninth grade I wasn’t paying much attention.

“That’s groovy underwear,” Jeannie said, sizing me up as I plucked my skirt from the hook in my locker.

“Thanks.” I wanted to say more but nothing came to mind.

“Did your mom make that?”

“Yeah.”

“Wow,” she turned away as if finished with me, reaching for a white ruffled blouse hanging inside her locker. Then, as she maneuvered each button down her perfect chest, to my surprise she addressed me again.

“Chrisie, I was wondering, where are your parents from?”

“They were born in Poland.” I was surprised at her interest, because I doubted Jeannie’s mom shopped in the fine stores that sold my mother’s creations. I suspected she shopped at Penny’s or Sears and Roebuck, stores to which the Olga Company had no interest in selling.

“Then why aren’t you Catholic?”

All the Catholics at Paul Revere Junior High knew each other; they attended St. Martin of Tours in Brentwood or Corpus Christi in Pacific Palisades. I always wore a small gold cross around my neck. She must have noticed.

“I’m a Congregationalist,” I said proudly.

“How can that be?” She looked straight into my eyes now. “Poles are either Catholics, or Jews—and there are few of those left.”

I didn’t know how to reply except to say there were also a number of Congregationalists from Poland. Honestly, I hadn’t a clue what I was talking about. I had a limited knowledge of history, and as for the religions of Poland, I knew nothing. In fact, regarding Poland I knew very little at all, apart from the taste of Polish sausage, the colorful costumes of the peasant dolls my mother collected, and the bouncy sound of polkas my mother played on our phonograph so she could dance the half jump steps around the living room. I knew my parents lost most of their family to the Holocaust, but the details were never discussed in our home. Even in history class I can’t remember learning about the Holocaust. Not in the Sixties. Not in Brentwood.

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The First Lady of Underfashions is a nonfiction saga-like memoir written by Christina Erteszek and includes excerpts from her parents' unpublished memoirs. It is a complex, layered, and nuanced story that bridges the violence of war, the innovation of thought, the singularity of religion, the quest for identity, and the intrigues and intricacies of family life. Jan and Olga escape from World War II Europe and arrive in the US with just a few dollars. They turn their paltry savings into a multi-million-dollar fashion business. Olga becomes a leading patent holder of female lingerie, a trendsetter in the industry, and is widely known for her innovative business tactics. But as this husband-and-wife team think of retiring, they decide to merge with another fashion company, which proves to be a fatal move when a loophole in the agreement allows for a hostile takeover. This is also a story of a daughter's need to find herself. Along her path to self-discovery, she discovers her parents have many secrets, some of which will never be revealed.

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I remember following my mom out to the sewing floor through the front offices, past Father’s secretary, Evelyn Campbell, then in and out of a labyrinth of boxed-in rooms housing advertising, accounting, and customer service.

I see Olga waltzing like a celebrity through the stadium-sized sewing floor, her full round face, high cheekbones, and shapely physique the only things giving weight to this incongruous reality. By her side I am shy and look down often. Still, I can’t help but notice the gracious glances she receives from some of the workers.

As we approach the sewing operators, I see a chorus of seated bodies hovering in position. A boisterous pitch of furious power machines envelopes us. A whiff of oil from freshly basted machine portholes drifts past from Dave, the gangly mechanic, who reminded me of a coal miner with his face, hair and neck covered in grime and grease. His mechanic’s jumpsuit, once blue, is saturated in dark grease stains. Dave liked to whistle through the drumming roar of surging machines while sewing operators curled over Singers and Berninas, each manipulating their machines like an Indy 500 racer, so precise, so skilled, not wasting a moment or motion, a second of time. Overlock daisy chains of braided thread link one garment to the other like a string of prayer flags. Each garment falls in folds into canvas carts to the right of the machines. Eager line supervisors collect the carts, pushing them to finishing, where the braided umbilical cords are cut. Next, bar-tack operators attach satin cloth labels in endless repetition, while quality-control inspectors stand over long tables. Measuring, stretching, pulling. Snip snipping. The tags featuring images of my mother’s face are secured at the left side of each piece before they are wrapped in glossy fuchsia boxes with white lettering.

The lunch bell rings, loud and steady. Robotic bodies unfurl, rising in unison from a collective dream, awakening to the world beyond the cloister of their stations. Like magic, they all vanish. The sound of piped-in music plays overhead as purring motors settle down.

Both my parents know these workers by name—some young, some stooped over from years of repetition. One Greek lady named Lydia was so bent over that her nose pointed down to her feet as she walked. Some years later my parents paid for an operation to straighten Lydia’s spine. Afterward, she was so grateful to look straight into people’s eyes again. “For so many years,” Lydia told my parents through tears of joy, “all I ever saw when I walked across a room or down a street were my toes.”

When we get back to the design room, Rosa has finished sewing up my bra, made from little pieces of French lace: two small doilies attached to stretchy side bands that hooked together in the back, tiny pink and green satin buds placed at the center front and at the top of the flat discs where the shoulder straps attached. The straps and back band are elasticized and substantial enough to show under my blouse; that is a must. If a boy tries to snap my bra band, I won’t be ashamed: I’ve become a viable candidate for the boys to chase around the asphalt playground, even though that may never happen.

BUY THE BOOK

The First Lady of Underfashions is a nonfiction saga-like memoir written by Christina Erteszek and includes excerpts from her parents' unpublished memoirs. It is a complex, layered, and nuanced story that bridges the violence of war, the innovation of thought, the singularity of religion, the quest for identity, and the intrigues and intricacies of family life. Jan and Olga escape from World War II Europe and arrive in the US with just a few dollars. They turn their paltry savings into a multi-million-dollar fashion business. Olga becomes a leading patent holder of female lingerie, a trendsetter in the industry, and is widely known for her innovative business tactics. But as this husband-and-wife team think of retiring, they decide to merge with another fashion company, which proves to be a fatal move when a loophole in the agreement allows for a hostile takeover. This is also a story of a daughter's need to find herself. Along her path to self-discovery, she discovers her parents have many secrets, some of which will never be revealed.

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Olga (holding shovel) and Jan Erteszek, April 1952 groundbreaking for Olga Company headquarters.

My parents’ growing business and my mother’s growing belly probably didn’t give her much time to think about dear friends and family she had to leave behind. As the stress mounted with Jan and Olga doing so many of the primary tasks themselves, they longed for a trusted associate who could catapult their business beyond its present state. Enter underwear salesman Palmer Edward Griggs, known to his friends as P.E. One day at Bullock’s, Griggs watched Irene Ross, who befriended my parents during the war on their escape route and now worked alongside them, present a collection of Olga garter belts to a Bullock’s buyer. He approached them discreetly.

“Excuse me, ladies, but may I introduce myself?” he removed his hat with a slight bow. He wore a linen three-piece suit and well-polished brown and tan spectator shoes. “I couldn’t help but notice these exquisite garter belts. I’m not familiar with that brand.”

He explained to Irene that he was a salesman for Trezur Corset Company, which produced heavy corsetry with steel stays and lacings. When he overheard that Irene was only helping Olga temporarily, he turned up at my parents’ company doorstep the following morning.

P.E. was hired as head of sales and within a week he brought in a new order for ten dozen garters a month. My mother’s memoir continues:

We were by now occupying the whole upper floor of the Beverly-Vermont office building. There were twelve connecting rooms with twenty operators and an army reject honest-to-goodness cutter who introduced us to the art of folding the fabric into layers and, having drawn the patterns on a paper sheet on top, slicing it like a layer cake with an electric blade. While I was busy sewing, designing and teaching new, inexperienced sewers, Johnny wore the many hats of office clerk, parking boy and deliveryman. I broke up laughing one day when I overheard him answering our only phone.

“Olga Corsetry Company.” His voice, thickly punctuated with a Polish accent, was very businesslike. When the caller requested to talk to someone in shipping, Johnny, without hesitation, rattled the receiver as though transferring, then answered again, “shipping department”—still unable to conceal his hard “r’s.”

BUY THE BOOK

The First Lady of Underfashions is a nonfiction saga-like memoir written by Christina Erteszek and includes excerpts from her parents' unpublished memoirs. It is a complex, layered, and nuanced story that bridges the violence of war, the innovation of thought, the singularity of religion, the quest for identity, and the intrigues and intricacies of family life. Jan and Olga escape from World War II Europe and arrive in the US with just a few dollars. They turn their paltry savings into a multi-million-dollar fashion business. Olga becomes a leading patent holder of female lingerie, a trendsetter in the industry, and is widely known for her innovative business tactics. But as this husband-and-wife team think of retiring, they decide to merge with another fashion company, which proves to be a fatal move when a loophole in the agreement allows for a hostile takeover. This is also a story of a daughter's need to find herself. Along her path to self-discovery, she discovers her parents have many secrets, some of which will never be revealed.

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“It was Olga’s special attention to detail that made her garments stand out,” Jan Erteszek would later claim. This was especially true on one auspicious day in Los Angeles, in the late spring of 1942.

Olga and Jan waited for a trolley at the corner of Beverly and Third, when Olga nudged my father as he looked off into some corner of their new world. Perhaps he’d spotted the First Congregational Church on Sixth and Commonwealth, the one he and my mother would join, with its incongruous, imposing Gothic architecture reminiscent of Krakow. Or perhaps he was remembering some dark image from the Soviet occupation, the German terror, or thinking of his family back in Poland.

“Johnny, look over there,” Olga pointed out a well-dressed lady who stood ready to enter the streetcar. Both would have appreciated the woman’s careful outfit: belted, white linen sheath, a row of alabaster buttons marching up the back of her dress. The lady wore a pair of stylish red pumps, and a white-gloved hand clutched a matching red purse.

“Look at her legs!” Olga whispered in Polish as the lady high-stepped onto the platform. Her mid-calf-length skirt hiked up, revealing a rope of mud-brown stockings rolled down just under her knee. It was a reminder to Olga that the war continued, though it was almost unimaginable in the beautiful safe haven of Southern California. Still, the evidence of wartime sacrifices showed up on the legs of women like this. Silk was unavailable, being more valuable for parachutes, and its scarcity was increased by poor American-Asian relations.

Olga and Jan entered the car last before it eased its way toward Hoover Boulevard. Olga found an empty bench and slid next to the window, adjusting her blue knit skirt that just brushed her mid-calf. She patted the spare bench for Johnny to be seated and he did with care.

“Did you see her stockings? Like a piece of sausage,” Olga said in Polish. She had noticed this American custom before: well-dressed ladies in the newest fashions revealing rolled-down stockings as they climbed onto trolley platforms or scurried up escalators.

Olga thought the sight “vulgar.” Maybe Polish peasants would roll their hose below their knees, but well-dressed modern women?

BUY THE BOOK

The First Lady of Underfashions is a nonfiction saga-like memoir written by Christina Erteszek and includes excerpts from her parents' unpublished memoirs. It is a complex, layered, and nuanced story that bridges the violence of war, the innovation of thought, the singularity of religion, the quest for identity, and the intrigues and intricacies of family life. Jan and Olga escape from World War II Europe and arrive in the US with just a few dollars. They turn their paltry savings into a multi-million-dollar fashion business. Olga becomes a leading patent holder of female lingerie, a trendsetter in the industry, and is widely known for her innovative business tactics. But as this husband-and-wife team think of retiring, they decide to merge with another fashion company, which proves to be a fatal move when a loophole in the agreement allows for a hostile takeover. This is also a story of a daughter's need to find herself. Along her path to self-discovery, she discovers her parents have many secrets, some of which will never be revealed.

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Connections—contacts in the right places—helped my parents survive during their exodus. contacts in the right places. It’s easy to imagine father scrutinizing the cacophony of actors, manipulating his chess pieces, using his confidence to command the room despite his awkward brace, the corrective boot adding several inches to his foreshortened right leg. It didn’t stop him. Somehow others looked past it. He had his wit and he had his Otylia.

One afternoon the captain’s wife returned with a foot-pedal Singer sewing machine. [I’m assuming, through the cajoling of Jakub, Otylia offered to teach Tania Krassov how to sew] and after that we spent much time in Komandir Krassov’s spacious quarters, a large room facing the street. We were invited to dinner frequently, after which the two wives pedaled away on the machine, turning out dresses for themselves and pinafores for the children, if Mme. Krassov found cloth. We accepted the invitations gladly, as we discovered the Army provisioned its officers with better food than we could purchase.

At first, after-dinner conversation between Komandir and myself dealt with the unusual spring warmth, the need for rain, and the shortest way from the villa to the center of town, among other unprovocative subjects. I was careful to voice no opinions on my real thoughts.

While the wives sewed, Captain Krassov brought out a hand-carved chess set he purchased from some hard-up Lvóvian who accepted the 100 Rubles for the ivory pieces.

The captain was the first to talk away from non-committal subjects when one evening he began discussing the War.

“The British are weaklings,” the captain began, as we concluded a game. He maneuvered his pieces up and down the board as in the Battle of the Lowlands and the Battle of France to show why. This was the first time either of us had made a statement on any subject beyond the weather. “I don’t want the Nazis to win, but the British are making it impossible for Hitler to lose.”

I made no comment.

BUY THE BOOK

The First Lady of Underfashions is a nonfiction saga-like memoir written by Christina Erteszek and includes excerpts from her parents' unpublished memoirs. It is a complex, layered, and nuanced story that bridges the violence of war, the innovation of thought, the singularity of religion, the quest for identity, and the intrigues and intricacies of family life. Jan and Olga escape from World War II Europe and arrive in the US with just a few dollars. They turn their paltry savings into a multi-million-dollar fashion business. Olga becomes a leading patent holder of female lingerie, a trendsetter in the industry, and is widely known for her innovative business tactics. But as this husband-and-wife team think of retiring, they decide to merge with another fashion company, which proves to be a fatal move when a loophole in the agreement allows for a hostile takeover. This is also a story of a daughter's need to find herself. Along her path to self-discovery, she discovers her parents have many secrets, some of which will never be revealed.

Chapter 7 ■ Heading East

My father’s plan to get himself and Otylia to America took longer than expected as they encountered numerous complications and obstacles while escaping Poland. As agreed in the Soviet-German Nonaggression Pact of 1939, Stalin claimed all of Poland east of the Bug River. Germans and Soviet soldiers squeezed the Polish people in at every bridge, and my parents’ path to freedom would necessitate finding their way to centers of major transportation. Yet to get there, they found refuge in smaller, more secluded villages.

Nazi propaganda spread the myth that the legendary Polish cavalry had charged the German panzers with lances. Although such tales were exaggerated, it was true that the once-mighty Polish cavalry—despite being one million men strong—found it impossible to defend against this new reality. This was a different kind of war, of steel and motors, and a sophisticated, aggressive air force.

BUY THE BOOK

The First Lady of Underfashions is a nonfiction saga-like memoir written by Christina Erteszek and includes excerpts from her parents' unpublished memoirs. It is a complex, layered, and nuanced story that bridges the violence of war, the innovation of thought, the singularity of religion, the quest for identity, and the intrigues and intricacies of family life. Jan and Olga escape from World War II Europe and arrive in the US with just a few dollars. They turn their paltry savings into a multi-million-dollar fashion business. Olga becomes a leading patent holder of female lingerie, a trendsetter in the industry, and is widely known for her innovative business tactics. But as this husband-and-wife team think of retiring, they decide to merge with another fashion company, which proves to be a fatal move when a loophole in the agreement allows for a hostile takeover. This is also a story of a daughter's need to find herself. Along her path to self-discovery, she discovers her parents have many secrets, some of which will never be revealed.

Had Jakub and Otylia realized all the hardships that lay ahead, they might have stayed at home and tried to sit out the war with their families. But their youthful zeal kept them trudging forward that September day in 1939. My parents never seemed to look back, believing all the time that God would take care of them. It’s a waste of time to ponder what if, though it brings up issues of fate versus chance. It makes me think of twists my own life took as a result of their war years―all that they lost and had to forget. My mother writes:

Now there was no return, so we surged on. All around us, throngs of humanity—old and young alike—moved east towards the Russian border in an effort to get one jump ahead of the German tankers; hoping to reach an imaginary haven. We were very lucky indeed to have the buggy, and our old nag, Kuba, who became our most precious commodity. Along the road we picked up an editor of our local newspaper, just barely recovering from ulcer surgery, an older woman with two daughters, and two or three individuals who looked as if they couldn’t negotiate another step. There were now eleven of us on the small buggy.

Our poor brave Kuba pulled, strained, and sweated until we divided our little regiment and took turns walking. We went way into the night, stopping occasionally at a peasant’s hut, asking for a drink of water from the outdoor well and offering an inflated amount of money for a freshly baked loaf of bread, grabbing it before it was ready to come out of the earthen oven. At night we pulled over toward a grouping of roadside willows and, exhausted, fell into deep dreamless sleep, only to wake up with a start at the first rays of sun, to continue our arduous journey into the unknown…

Scores of fancy foreign cars and powerful motorcycles lay by the roadside, abandoned for lack of fuel, this surrealistic panorama attesting to the fickle insecurity of wealth. Still, tired and uncertain as we were, we couldn’t help but chuckle at the sight of some whom we passed. There were individuals pushing baby buggies heaped with personal belongings and men peddling bicycles whose rubber tires had fallen off, causing them to weave and twist on the uneven road. One ingenious character made time on a child-size skateboard. But what made us break into uncontrolled laughter was the sight of a local banker, dressed in a business suit, pushing a wheelbarrow in which his corpulent wife, a well-known and disliked snob, sat painfully aware of the glances and muffled giggles.

Together the couple fell in with the masses, looking for routes that might allow them to stay ahead of the Germans. I imagine seeing my parents’ hands clutched and entwined tight as they look back at the sharp curves of the Tatra Mountains, a glint of light dancing off a body of water, Krakow’s treetops painted yellow, hinting at fall around the corner. They telepathically question when and if they would see their beloved city again.

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The First Lady of Underfashions is a nonfiction saga-like memoir written by Christina Erteszek and includes excerpts from her parents' unpublished memoirs. It is a complex, layered, and nuanced story that bridges the violence of war, the innovation of thought, the singularity of religion, the quest for identity, and the intrigues and intricacies of family life. Jan and Olga escape from World War II Europe and arrive in the US with just a few dollars. They turn their paltry savings into a multi-million-dollar fashion business. Olga becomes a leading patent holder of female lingerie, a trendsetter in the industry, and is widely known for her innovative business tactics. But as this husband-and-wife team think of retiring, they decide to merge with another fashion company, which proves to be a fatal move when a loophole in the agreement allows for a hostile takeover. This is also a story of a daughter's need to find herself. Along her path to self-discovery, she discovers her parents have many secrets, some of which will never be revealed.

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Jan Erteszek

The First Lady of Underfashions is a nonfiction saga-like memoir written by Christina Erteszek and includes excerpts from her parents' unpublished memoirs. It is a complex, layered, and nuanced story that bridges the violence of war, the innovation of thought, the singularity of religion, the quest for identity, and the intrigues and intricacies of family life. Jan and Olga escape from World War II Europe and arrive in the US with just a few dollars. They turn their paltry savings into a multi-million-dollar fashion business. Olga becomes a leading patent holder of female lingerie, a trendsetter in the industry, and is widely known for her innovative business tactics. But as this husband-and-wife team think of retiring, they decide to merge with another fashion company, which proves to be a fatal move when a loophole in the agreement allows for a hostile takeover. This is also a story of a daughter's need to find herself. Along her path to self-discovery, she discovers her parents have many secrets, some of which will never be revealed.

Chapter 1

The massive trunks of the coral trees lining the median of the San Vicente Boulevard drew my father’s attention as I drove us in the spring of 1986, the trunks reminding me of naked brown bodies, their determined limbs boldly reaching toward the sky. Orange flowers hung from branches like ornaments, the clusters matching the coral earrings I remembered Mother wearing when I was a child.

My eyes fixed to the road, I heard him speak, but his voice was low and nearly inaudible.

“Coral trees present like fruit trees,” he said. “Flowers show first, ahead of the leaves.”

I gripped the steering wheel, conscious of the fragility of the man beside me whose dark, intense eyes were taking in the magnificent specimens along the grassy median as we headed south toward the ocean. A scattering of joggers ran up and down the San Vicente as we sped past in his maroon 1984 Cadillac DeVille. It was like my father to notice trees. He had the eye of a farmer, the hand and mind of a gardener, and he liked to quote an allegory from the Bible: the well-tended seed reaped the best crop. My mother was like a hothouse flower, father said. And like the flower, she was so beautifully fragile she thrived best with his special attention. Mother accepted this comparison, comforted by her husband’s desire to protect her while expanding her horizons. He was her Pygmalion, father claimed and mother acquiesced. Jan J. Erteszek had groomed Olga since she was but a child.

Father took another whiff of oxygen from the tube that snaked over his lap down to the tank at his feet; his brown-flecked hand pinched the nasal cannula to his nose as he breathed in. He seemed small right now, almost weightless, nearly insignificant as his lips quivered with alarming weakness. He held tight to the armrest, uncomfortable in his seventy-three-year-old body, but when I looked in his eyes, I could still see his essential self—thoughtful, intelligent, dark with knowing—his reality tinged with fear, his skin jaundiced and sallow despite years in the sun tending his beloved ranch in Tehachapi.

He coughed suddenly, bringing me back to the front seat of the Cadillac, back to him as he began to speak. “When I first arrived in Los Angeles forty-five years ago, a streetcar ran beneath these trees.” He laughed softly, likely recalling the first time he and Mother left the horrors of war, and traveled to the Southern California coastline, riding the trolley up to the Palisades cliffs at Ocean Avenue. “When I was a boy in Krakow, the thought of coming to Los Angeles was like imagining going to the moon.”

I had heard his story many times before, just as I had heard my father tell innumerable other ones about his past, yet as I grew older, I also understood that there were just as many untold tales and hoped that this might be the day I would hear them. Instead, my father would repeat the same old ones. He didn’t do this because his memory had failed; it was a calculated plotting on his part, a desire to control and shape his life’s story as he told it.

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